Disqus - Latest Comments for DRMacIver

Re: How I make coffee

David R. MacIver — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:26:49 -0000

Hm. That's interesting. It's entirely possible I'm just not very good at coffee, though I thought I was. :-)

On further reflection, perhaps it's not the bitterness I object to in Espresso. There's a flavour I associate with it that I object to, but it's not *exactly* bitterness. It's possible I've just had bad espresso, though I've had a fair bit from people who claimed that they know what they're doing.

Your point about burnt flavours is interesting. There's a bean I've bought recently which when I made it this way tasted very burnt, but I just tried it this morning in a normal cafetiere and it was much more acceptable. It's definitely variable as to which beans this works with I think - I've mostly had a lot of success with beans from Monmouth (which tend to work well with filters I think) and not much luck with Climpson and Sons and Square Mile.

In terms of why this might not that be bitter, two possibilities:

Firstly, the big difference when comparing this with espresso extraction time is that espresso is at a constant heat, whileas this will rapidly cool below boiling point (if indeed it starts at this), and you'll get different flavour profiles coming out at different temperatures.

Secondly, because of the fine grind the filter really heavily silts up when this is draining. It's possible (although counter-intuitive) that the layer of silt is acting as an extra thick filter at that point if most of the flavours have already come out of it. That would be surprising but interesting if it were true.

Re: Dividing free and paid features in “freemium” products

David R. MacIver — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 03:24:49 -0000

Spotify is an interesting recent data point for the "shareware version which annoys you with ads" model. The paid version offers nothing that the free version doesn't (this may change ad people start to hack on spotify apps - using third party applications with spotify requires you to be a paid user - but there's nothing serious in that space yet), but the paid version will randomly insert ads into your playlist (with various restrictions to stop you skipping them).

It seems to work remarkably well. In my case at least it only took a few days for the ads to annoy me so much relative to the quality of service otherwise that I paid for it.

Re: Theme?

David R. MacIver — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:04:41 -0000

I've always liked the silo theme for tumblr ( http://silotheme.tumblr.com/ ). Pretty easy to repurpose with a different background image too.

Re: Comments on Disqus

David R. MacIver — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:09:12 -0000

By way of determining annoyingosity, this is a comment.

Is it annoying? We shall see.